[bmercer]

Hi all,

I am interested in exporting the boundary of the OpenFOAM mesh as an STL file, with the additional information of the values of variables (such as temperature and pressure) on each external cell face.

The utility surfaceMeshTriangulate works well for me to export the mesh in STL - basically, what I'm hoping for is a similar tool, but with the ability to access (and probably write to a separate file) variable values on each cell face. Conversion to STL will result in the triangulation of each patch face, so assigning the same variable value to each new triangular patch within a given cell face would be sufficient for my purposes.

Is there a tool available that can accomplish this, and if not, would anyone be able to offer guidance on how I might make modifications to the surfaceMeshTriangulate utility for doing this? Thank you!

[olesen]

Originally Posted by bmercer

Hi all,

I am interested in exporting the boundary of the OpenFOAM mesh as an STL file, with the additional information of the values of variables (such as temperature and pressure) on each external cell face.

The utility surfaceMeshTriangulate works well for me to export the mesh in STL - basically, what I'm hoping for is a similar tool, but with the ability to access (and probably write to a separate file) variable values on each cell face. Conversion to STL will result in the triangulation of each patch face, so assigning the same variable value to each new triangular patch within a given cell face would be sufficient for my purposes.

Is there a tool available that can accomplish this, and if not, would anyone be able to offer guidance on how I might make modifications to the surfaceMeshTriangulate utility for doing this? Thank you!

You may want to take a look at using sample surfaces for this, sample on the patches and write as VTK/Ensight/Nastran etc, which would be easier that doing it yourself. AFAIK there aren't currently any tutorials demonstrating exactly want you want, but grep for libsampling.so to see some other examples, which should get you started. Maybe some can provide to you an example.
/mark

[bmercer]

Thank you for your reply, Mark.

I figured out that the boundary condition externalCoupled does a good chunk of what I want for my purposes, namely writing boundary values for each external cell face to a file.

With that functionality discovered, I think my problem reduces to creating an STL mesh from an OpenFoam boundary, and creating a mapping (basically look-up table) which specifies the original OpenFoam boundary face from which each STL face was originally triangulated.

Since surfaceMeshTriangulate can create the desired STL mesh, I figure that's a good place to start. I have looked at the source code but am having trouble figuring out where it triangulates individual boundary faces, and how I can modify the code to tabulate the original boundary faces from which STL faces are created. If anyone has any insight on how this could be done, I would be grateful. Thanks!